2010-09-12 10:19:09
By Dave Lee BBC World Service
Imagine for a moment that you have thumbed a ride in one of London's iconic
black cabs.
"Where to, guv?" he asks, in typical cockney-twang. You tell him.
"No problem - let me just enter that into my sat-nav "
It sounds unnatural, almost deceitful, that any self-respecting London cabbie
would ever utter those words.
Continue reading the main story
Start Quote
In many ways I admire Google, but I think they have a narrow view of the way we
should be using our minds.
End Quote Nicholas Carr
After all, a taxi driver's ability to know every twist and turn of the
capital's streets is the stuff of legend.
It's not optional - unless drivers pass a formidable test - called "The
Knowledge" - they are not allowed to head out onto the roads in one of the
iconic vehicles.
But with satellite-navigation technology now well established as a cheap,
reliable way of being shown the way ahead, one expert has warned that we could
actually lose the intellectual capacity to remember vast amounts of information
- such as tricky routes through the capital city.
"The particular part of our brain that stores mental images of space is
actually quite enlarged in London cab drivers," explained Nicholas Carr, author
of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
"The longer you've been a cab driver the larger that part of your brain is."
Mr Carr explained to Gareth Mitchell on BBC World Service's Digital Planet that
one study revealed concerns over technology use for cabbies.
"Almost certainly we'll see a diminishment, or even an eradication, of that
special quality of their brains."
Altered activity
It could be argued that if a sat-nav can save months of studying for The
Knowledge, while, in theory at least, making travelling around easier, then
that can only be a good thing.
Not so, argues Mr Carr. Technology, particularly the web, has been found to
have lasting effects on our brains, altering our ability to carry out certain
tasks.
A hand types in front of a Google logo Mr Carr says the simpler that sites like
Google get, the less able we are to learn
"The most interesting [study] had people who hadn't had experience with the web
begin to use Google, for just an hour a day, and begin searching and surfing."
The results showed how even just a small amount of use triggered varying
patterns of brain activity.
"On the one hand, a lot of their decision-making parts of their brain were
activated which means it can help keep a mind sharp, for instance, as we get
older.
"But it also seemed to indicate the kind of patterns of activity that would
make it hard for you to concentrate. If you're always solving problems and
making decisions you can't have the calm mind you get when you read a book."
The key to making us concentrate, Mr Carr suggests, is perhaps to make tasks
difficult - a theory which flies in the face of software designers the world
over who constantly strive to make their programs easier to use than the
competition.
Industrial view
Google is the prime culprit, Mr Carr says.
"In many ways I admire Google, but I think they have a narrow view of the way
we should be using our minds.
"They have this very much of an industrial view that everything's about how
efficiently you can find that particular bit of information you need - and then
move on to the next."
He argues that this even applies to projects like Google Books - designed to
bring literacy to a bigger audience, and to make the world's knowledge more
accessible.
"They're scanning these books, I think, with a view that will not take in the
whole books, but they'll become more content for its search engine.
"What it's purveying is this view of all information being delivered as
snippets. When you go to a Google Books page, you're not engaged in a long
narrative in the book."
In his book, Mr Carr cites an article on this website written by technology
commentator Bill Thompson.
The article described a simple experiment where a puzzle needed to be solved
using a computer program. One half of participants were given a 'good' program
- it gave hints, was intuitive and generally helped the user to their goal.
The other half took on the same puzzle, but with software which offered little
to make the task easier.
"The people who had the weakest software, who had to struggle with the problem,
learned much more than the people with the most helpful software," Mr Carr
explained.
"Months later - the people who had the unhelpful software actually could
remember how to do the puzzle, and the people with the helpful software
couldn't."
Mr Carr says that this simple experiment could suggest that as computer
software becomes easier to use, making complicated tasks easier, we risk losing
the ability to properly learn something - in effect "short-circuiting" the
brain.
"When you think about how we're coming to depend on software for all sorts of
intellectual chores, for finding information, for socialising - you need to
start worrying that it's not giving us, as individuals, enough room to act for
ourselves."